In the second half of the ninth century a new alphabet appeared in Europe. It was created by the brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, whom Pope John Paul II proclaimed spiritual patrons of the Old Continent in 1980. Their deed laid the beginnings of the Slavonic script and culture - large in scale and democratic in spirit. The Thessaloniki brothers were Byzantium's Christian missioners. Byzantium wanted to draw to the bosom of the Eastern-Orthodox Church the vast Slav sea in Europe through the new letters and the translation of liturgical books into the vernacular. By translating the most important liturgical books Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius broke the then existing trilingual dogma of sermon in only the three "sacred" languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The brothers were accused of heresy but, following dramatic struggles, the Slavonic language was recognized as an official liturgical language by the Church of Rome in 869. Having decided to adopt Christianity for himself and his people from Byzantium, the Bulgarian Prince Boris I, was the only one, who received the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, too. Marvelous for the Middle Ages literary schools were set up and thus Bulgaria turned into a cradle of the Slavonic script and culture.

Each nation, whose religion in connected with speech, receives it in its own or foreign language. This is a tradition - starting with the Semitic people, passing through the conversion to Christianity of the Armenians, who had their alphabet, the Georgians and so on and so forth - all peoples, whom Saint Cyril enumerates in his famous speech in Venice, defending the right of the Slavs to literacy in their own language. It was in that speech that he said: " Do you think that our Lord is so impotent he cannot do this, or so envious that he doesn't want to do it?" Obviously, our national fate is connected with speech. And we had the double luck that both Prince Boris the first and his son - King Simeon realized they could take everything from Byzantium, without being afraid they would be Byzantized, if they had their own script, by way of which to adapt the rich Christian culture to Slavonic. What's more - to encourage not only translations, but the creation of authors' works.

  The author of the first Slavonic alphabet - the Glagolithic - was Saint Cyril, called also the Philosopher and he graduated from the famous Magnaura school in Constantinople and was renowned for his excellent command of a number of languages.

In his last mission Saint Cyril was specially assigned the task of evolving an alphabet. According to his passional, written very soon after his death and despite its literary character and typical of that time idealization, and is a first-class historical source, the Byzantine Emperor summoned him and said: "Philosopher, I know you are ill, but I want you to go among the Slavs and be their teacher." Saint Cyril replied: " I would be glad to go there, if they have their language's alphabet." And more: "Who can write with a finger on water and win himself the name of a heretic?" Thus he stressed it was important the Emperor and the Patriarch bless his deed and that was what actually happened. Saint Cyril evolved the Glagolithic feeling God-inspired. To do that he transformed some letters from the Hebrew script, others - from the Greek script and so on and so forth, but what distinguished his alphabet most vividly, was the symbolism he put in it. Three main symbols were present in the most important letters: the isosceles triangle, which is the symbol of the Saint Trinity, the circle - the sign of the Sun and the Christian Cross. In addition to that the new alphabet reflects in an excellent way the phonetic peculiarities of the Bulgarian Tessaloniki dialect. Every letter corresponded to a certain sound as the keen ear of the great philologist, whom our Saint Cyril was, had heard it. Later, however, when the script was no longer a missionary one, the letters were drawn in a different way and thus the Glagolithic was transformed into the Cyrilic, in which, with small alterations, we write today, too.